Name: Dried Apricots
Ingredients: dried apricots; sugar

Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dried Apricots

Ingredients

dried apricots
sugar

Directions

Coat the apricots

Heat sugar until it becomes dull or whitish.
Add dried apricots and gently shake to coat.
Use a silver fork to lift out apricots, placing them outer side up on a brass drainer.

Dry and store

Set them in a screen to dry for about an hour.
Store in boxes with clean paper between each layer of dried apricots.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dried apricots: Provide the fruit that is coated and dried, giving the finished sweet, chewy texture.
Sugar: Forms a dull, whitish coating on the apricots that helps keep their surface from becoming sticky.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.